I pasted a text from Gutenberg.org and
used the Text Body style. Some
paragraphs responded properly.
Always use the “paste as Unformatted text” for textual contents what you want to paste from a foreign source to your document. The normal Paste function can paste some unwanted (unknown, incompatible) formatting properties.
All the paragraphs that behaved
peculiarly either had (1) curly quotes
at the very beginning of the paragraph
(i.e., not typewriter-style quotes);
Curly quotes and typewriter quotes have different character code. It is not a formatting related plroblem. You can substitute them by a simple find and replace.
I can correct the problem with cntl-M
(Clear Direct Formatting), but that
also destroys all the italics and
bolding in the original text.
This is the main reason, why it is better to use the STYLES. The properties of the Paragraph Styles and the Character Styles will not be resetted by the Ctrl-M. Only the manual (direct) formatting properties will be resetted.) Use the Paragraph Styles for formatting the whole paragraph, and then use the Character Styles for formatting small parts of the text in a specific paragraph what is formatted by a paragraph style.